the business we’re in
by SenLinYu
Summary: Tom takes pride in his skill set. When he’s chosen for a job, he wants it to be as an acknowledgement that he is the best, that he isn’t being asked to waste his time doing something anyone can do. What’s challenging about a librarian? Mafia AU.


In retrospect, it's ironic that the first person Tom ever killed was a young female.

It hadn't been premeditated. The age and gender had been entirely coincidental. She was a homely, unpopular girl crying in the bathroom when Tom was a teenager dying to do something new—something thrilling.

He strangled her with his tie. Right there in the girls' bathroom, standing in front of the mirror so he could watch himself do it.

He felt her struggles weaken and watched her try to reach towards his face as she slowly turned blue.

He'd thought it merely a literary expression, but her pale skin did indeed turn a lovely shade of blue as the oxygen in her body depleted and she died in his arms.

Now Tom primarily kills men.

There's no challenge, nothing interesting or beneficial about killing young women. They're weak. Easy. They cry and panic without effort. Older women occasionally have their uses, but young women either have no money or receive too much attention.

When he gets the call and receives the assignment, he's enraged.

"Why the fuck am I being called in to deal with a librarian?"

"Orders," is all Abraxas says. "He wants it done neatly."

Tom rolls his eyes as he hangs up the phone and looks her up.

How many incompetents does Grindelwald have if a librarian goes all the way up the ladder to Tom?

Tom takes pride in his skill set. He's been developing it from a young age. When he's chosen for a job, he wants it to be as an acknowledgement that he is the best, that he isn't being asked to waste his time doing something anyone can do.

What's going to be challenging about a librarian?

Although, there is something about her.

Tom can't put his finger on what.

It's not that there's anything interesting about her. She's ordinary. Boring. Yet something seems vaguely off.

Perhaps it's merely nostalgia, it's been years since he's killed someone young enough to classify as a girl.

He's killed a fair number of boys. Idiotic boys who go into buildings where they have no business. Who walk towards the sounds they should have ignored.

Tom enjoys their terror. He calmly describes how they're going to die and watches as they began to feel their mortality. He draws attention to their beating hearts, the pulse in their throats. How small a cut is necessary to sever the carotid artery or open an esophagus.

Tom prefers psychological torture to the mess of physical torture. Why should he do the work when he can trick their own minds into doing it for him?

He relishes the moment when his victims realise they're nothing. They'd never mattered and they never will.

Now Tom is important enough that he isn't required to deal with boys. Grindelwald only calls him when the job is special.

Tom isn't an enforcer. He's a shadow, called when Grindelwald wants something cleaned up by an expert.

So why does Grindelwald want _him _to kill a librarian?

She isn't related to anyone important. She doesn't matter. He assumes she's seen something she shouldn't have.

She'll be easy. Home invasion gone wrong; he can stab her. A few decorative, careless wounds to look amateurish before he sinks the knife into her heart. Maybe he'll strangle her.

But something about her bothers him.

He tails her. Her flat. The bus to the library. The library. Her flat. Museums or bookstores on the weekend.

She's homely and socially awkward. No friends.

She talks on the phone with her mum in the evenings. Long meandering conversations that appear to have no point but hearing the other person's voice.

Anyone could kill her. Why assign him?

He goes and finds the Malfoy brat. Abraxas' grandson, who doesn't even need to be drunk in order to start spouting off information he shouldn't.

Tom ignores Malfoy's wittering and nurses his drink until something catches his ear.

"Mulciber's dead?" He set his whiskey down and stares at Malfoy.

Malfoy smirks. "Buried too. Did no one invite you to his funeral? Oversight, I'm sure."

Malfoy appears to think himself hilarious. "Brick caught him in the head. Freak accident. The police even investigated. His widow wanted to sue—but it was a condemned building with fences and plastered with signs requiring 'protective equipment.' So unless she wanted to admit he couldn't read for shit—" Malfoy snorts at his own joke.

Tom's fingers drift down, and he swirls his drink.

Mulciber was an enforcer. One of Grindelwald's oldest and had been the size of a prize bull.

"Dolohov too in another 'freak accident,'" Malfoy says, his eyes glittering as he watches for Tom's reaction. "I don't know the details on that one yet. You heard about the Lestrange brothers getting picked up for brawling at a pub last month, and Rabastan had a gun? The police keep finding more to keep them."

Tom nods carefully.

"Gell's on edge, Grandfather says. Worried someone's being ambitious." Malfoy leans back looking smug. "I've been ordered to—behave myself."

Tom refrains from snorting. If Malfoy was being told to behave himself, it was more likely because Abraxas feared he'd be the next one arrested or killed than because anyone suspected that he could be responsible.

Mulciber, Dolohov, the Lestranges. They're not minor figures. It's no mere inconvenience to lose them.

Grindelwald being "on edge" is an understatement. Especially if he suspects someone on the inside of being responsible.

Tom may know some of Grindelwald's darkest secrets, but he isn't part of the family.

Grindelwald finds him useful, but that doesn't mean he trusts Tom any more than Tom trusts him. Tom makes himself a vital asset, and Grindelwald provides a level of security and legitimacy while Tom establishes himself in the underworld. It's a humiliating necessity.

Tom had misstepped back before he even reached adulthood; hung out with the wrong crowd and caught the attention of a tenacious intelligence officer named Dumbledore. Now he's obliged to watch himself and disguise his activities behind larger targets. Grindelwald's sprawling interests are a convenient shield.

If key members are dying oddly or getting picked up by the police, it explains why Grindelwald is demanding excess caution and even local librarians require special handling.

He stops at home to pick up his toolkit and heads to her flat. She generally keeps her drapes closed, but her upstairs neighbor does not. Tom knows the layout of her cramped home. She has several additional locks on her door. Rather than deal with them, Tom breaks into the adjacent flat and hops over the dividing wall between the two balconies.

The balcony door is locked, but the latch on the window is old and easily broken.

The process is as natural as breathing. He slips inside and stands in the centre of the room, surveying it carefully. It's sparsely furnished, all second hand. Two metal folding chairs tucked under a heavily dented folding table. A couch that appears to be gasping its last breaths. It's clean. There are unframed posters of classic works of art pinned to the walls, and a sagging bookshelf that looks on the verge of collapsing or toppling from the quantity of books crammed onto it. There are neat stacks of books covering most surfaces.

Tom isn't sure what to even pretend to steal.

A thick pair of obnoxiously bright blue rubber kitchen gloves are draped over several bowls in the drying rack. He looks into her fridge and freezer and notices she's diabetic.

He glances into the bathroom before heading towards her room. Bedrooms are generally the most interesting. That's where people instinctively hide things.

The door's ajar. He pushes it slowly open and feels flicker of aggravation. Her room is as boring as the rest of her flat. A neatly made bed. No TV or dresser. There was a large poster with a Klimt painting over her bed of a crying woman. Another folding chair is tucked next to the bed and stacked with more books.

He closes the door and finds another art poster taped to it. This one has an angel holding a sword and an hourglass, flying behind a man. He stares at it only a moment before noticing the extension cord plugged in behind the door. It leads to the closet and under its door.

It's the first remotely interesting thing about the entire flat.

Tom walks over and grabs hold of the knob.

Instantly his entire body goes rigid. Agony shoots through his nerves and his muscles contract so violently he's certain they're peeling themselves off his bones. His entire body seizes rapidly with such excruciating force he's thrown across the room and slams into the wall.

He slides to the ground. As darkness swallows his vision, he watches the closet door swing open to reveal a serial killer wall.

* * *

Coming to hurts like fuck.

He groans and finds his mouth is tightly stuffed with fabric and taped shut. He jerks and finds himself immobilised. He's bound head to toe. The ropes are biting into his skin and make clear that he isn't going anywhere.

His eyes slide slowly open, taking in every detail. He's still in the room beside the bed, tied to the metal chair that had been previously functioning as the bedside table. His right hand is throbbing as though the voltage seared his skin off. The closet door with the photos of him, of Grindelwald, of the Malfoys, the Lestranges, and Mulciber, and everyone else is closed again. The heavy pair of rubber gloves lay beside the door.

It was a trap. The whole fucking flat had been a trap.

The poster with the angel is facing him. His toolkit lays unfurled on the bed. His heart rate increases slightly as he stares at it.

There's the soft sound of padding feet and then the door swings open.

Up close the librarian is unnervingly young. Tom suddenly understands why people feel uncomfortable with him. There's an eeriness about her.

Tom's never felt afraid of anyone before, but a cold sweat begins to collect between his shoulders as he stares at her.

She's plain. Her large brown eyes study him carefully beneath an unkempt tangle of brown hair. She chews on her lower lip. She's dressed from head to toe in brown and beige clothes. She looks ordinary. Dull. The kind of person who wasn't worth looking at twice.

It's a ruse and pisses Tom off as he realises it. If he'd gone into the library and spoken to her once, he's certain he would have seen through it all.

"You're awake," she says. Then she steps into the room and closes the door behind her.

She's not planing to kill him immediately or torture him much. That is the one detail that Tom feels fairly confident about. She's meticulous and there's no tarp or plastic sheeting under him.

Unless she's just going to electrocute him again. His muscles are still aching and twinging. He realises the smell in the room is probably his burnt flesh.

"So—if I've got this right," she shifts her weight back and forth between her feet as she begins speaking. "You're LV. Right? I'm pretty sure I've got that right."

Then corner of her mouth quirks briefly into a smile and her boring brown eyes suddenly are glittering.

This is the real version of her.

"You don't know me, but I've been keeping track of you for a while now. It took a long time to get to you."

She walks over to her bed and sits down before lifting his toolkit onto her lap. Tom watches her carefully. He keeps testing the ropes, trying to see if there's looseness anywhere he can try to slowly exploit.

She's going to talk to him. He can tell. She's going to tell him why she's doing what she's doing.

He knows it, because it's what he'd do. Which, as he sits on the receiving end, feels cartoonishly villainous.

She picks up one of the knives in the kit and examines it, running the blade against her fingernail. It's an ordinary knife. A kitchen knife that can be picked up at most stores.

Sometimes when Tom stages home invasions he uses their own knives. It makes the murders appear more impulsive. Adds a dash of irony. But young men occasionally have nothing but plastic bowls and disposable cutlery. Tom hates using paring knives. He brings his own, in case he needs it.

"Let me guess, home invasion gone wrong?" She looks at him from the corner of her eye. Tom refuses to respond.

She tugs out the thin, supple wire cord with two thumb loops. "You don't strangle people often."

He refrains from rolling his eyes. She taunting him. She knows about him and he clearly knows nothing about her. He isn't even sure if she does this professionally, although he doubts it somehow.

"You're probably wondering why I'm doing this. If this is a job for me too. It's not. It's a personal thing. You see—I've always been a bit odd. Moreso, back in school."

She's going through his entire kit and getting her fingerprints all over it. It's enraging to see someone do something amateurish while holding him hostage.

"I only had two friends." She's inspecting his lock-pick set. "They were my best friends. They wanted to be police officers and save the world.You killed both of them. We'd just graduated and they went camping with some other friends. I was on a trip in Greece."

Tom's eyes narrowed. Camping rang a bell. It had to have been more than four years ago. A group of teenagers had broken into one of Grindelwald's buildings. Two had managed to run.

Tom had dealt with them and framed a local gang.

Boys. Stupid boys full of bravado until he made it slowly bleed into terror.

Her face is shuttered as she speaks. "They were probably just a job for you. But they were my best friends. The police didn't look very hard. An orphan with a convicted felon as godfather and the sixth child of seven in a poor family. Just the kind of kids who run with the wrong crowd. The case was already closed when I got home. I missed their funerals because Molly didn't know how to call me."

She rolls his kit up and lays it aside. "I didn't know what to do at first. It took a long time to figure out what happened. And I didn't know who to blame once I had. By then you weren't Tom Riddle anymore, you were LV." She looks at him and scrunches up her nose. "What does LV even mean? You've killed loads more than 55 people. Are you Grindlewald's fifty-fifth cleaner? Are you OCD and you always spend exactly fifty-five minutes murdering people?"

Tom just glowers at her.

He has never wanted to kill anyone as much as he wants to kill this girl. It's like a burning need in his veins.

He's not a serial killer. He doesn't kill compulsively. His methods are varied and focused on results, not the process. He kills people if there's no reason not to and it benefits him in some way.

This girl is different.

He's wanted to kill plenty of people before, but this isn't an impulse borne from brief irritation. It's not a quick flash of rage, a "snap the neck so they'll stop talking" type of mood. Although he'd love to make her stop talking.

He needs to kill her like he needs oxygen.

He can feel the desire in his bones as though she's injected him with something.

She's chattering away to him about everyone in Grindelwald's syndicate that she's killed over the years in the process of working her way up to Tom. It's bizarre. She's not gloating or trying to inspire terror. She's just talking to him the way she'd talked on the phone to her mum.

She's lonely. Tom is someone to talk to about what she does. She knows he's smart. That they're both smarter than everyone else.

Tom lets her prattle while he keeps testing the ropes and watching her. Picking up all her tics and quirks.

His eyes lock onto the pulse under her jaw, her tongue darting out to lick her lips a moment before her teeth catch and worry it, then she speaks again.

He's going to kill her slowly. He's going to draw a noose slowly around her neck and savour every moment of her agony and fear. He's going to electrocute her, watching her writhe. When he stops the pulse of electricity, he'll swallow her screams and feel her racing pulse while he devours her.

Murder doesn't generally arouse Tom. There are plenty of men he knows who always get hard off a job. It's the sense of power, of subjugation. The blood races, pulsing full of hormones, the synapses of the brain are alight and the high feels sexual. Like it needs that final climax to be complete.

Jerking off or finding someone to fuck afterwards isn't uncommon.

Tom rarely feels the need. There's never been a sexual component to any of his murders, although he has occasionally utilised his appearance against his targets. It's a job, and most victims aren't challenging enough to even be remotely thrilling at this point. It's an intellectual and creative problem at best.

He experienced the sexual reaction briefly when he strangled Myrtle Warren, simply because she was the first and that made her thrilling. Tom had ignored the physical reaction. She was also stupid and boring. Unworthy of him.

But Tom is getting hard just thinking about killing the librarian. It's sexual. There's no point in even trying to deny it.

He wants to fuck her.

He wants to break her into pieces. He wants to unspool her mind until she begs him to kill her.

He wants to do all the things that have never interested him before to her. Because she is interesting.

She's not ordinary like everyone else. She's special. He's going to slice all the specialness out of her.

He might just spend years doing it.

His heart starts pounding until the blood is roaring in his veins. He's perspiring but it's not a cold sweat any more. He can't tear his eyes away from her.

"Anyway—none of that really matters," she says with a shrug.

Her eyes alight on him, and she studies him with calculating gaze; as though she knows precisely what he's thinking about as he looks at her. She doesn't cower from it. She doesn't flush and look frightened.

She simply notices it

Her eyes have a brief flicker of triumph to them.

His heartbeat increases slightly more, and he feels rage wash over him that she's beaten him by predicting things about him that he wasn't even conscious of.

The only reason he's not frothing with rage is because he can tell this is only the beginning. She isn't going to kill him. She needs him for something.

She leans forward, and her eyes are stunningly intelligent. Her gaze is anticipatory.

Tom feels as though she's the first person who's ever seen him. The real him.

She reaches out. His skin prickles before her fingers touch him. She unbuttons the collar of his shirt and spends a moment checking his pulse.

They're close. So close he can smell the scent of her shampoo. He strains against the ropes, and the corner of her mouth twitches.

He wants to strangle her.

She stands without a word and leaves. He can hear her in the kitchen and he glares at the painting of the angel across from him.

She walks back in with something in hand. He jerks slightly when he realises its the box with syringes of insulin.

She smiles as she pulls one out. "Don't worry, it's not actually insulin."

He wants to flay her.

He tries to pull away, but she calmly holds him in place as the needle sinks into the side of his neck.

She looks down, studying his face as he fights the drugs. His head starts to loll after a few seconds.

"When you wake up, you're going to feel really confused. Best try to run." Her voice is growing slower and slower, as though she's dragging out the syllables. They're lilting. Taunting him.

They rise up and swallow him like heavy black velvet.

He's still thinking about how he'll kill her when everything goes dark.

* * *

His head is on the verge of cracking open when he groggily comes to. He's laid out somewhere pitch black, not tied any longer.

His right hand is throbbing agonisingly and so are the soles of his feet. He sits up, wincing.

She must have dosed him with painkillers when he'd been unconscious the first time. His right hand has been carefully bandaged.

He pushes himself up clumsily. Run. She told him to run. Why did he need to run?

He can't see a thing. He's inside a building. Somewhere with an expensive rug and smooth wood flooring. He finds a wall and feels along it with his left hand until he finds a light switch.

He flicks it twice.

No light.

The power is cut. What is she doing?

He feels his way unsteadily across the room, along several bookshelves until he finds curtains and jerks them back.

The moon isn't full but it's bright enough. He turns and finds McNair's corpse laid out by the door of the study he's in.

He stands frozen as he takes in the room.

Home invasion gone wrong. It's as if he staged it himself.

She copycatted him down to the detail that his right hand is injured and he would have needed to attack McNair left-handed.

His toolkit is unfurled on the desk.

Run.

Run.

He verifies none of the tools are missing, except his kitchen knife which currently sticking out of McNair's chest. He jerks out the knife and rolls his kit up rapidly, stuffing it into his jacket pocket.

The soles of his feet are burning with every step. and there's no way to get out of the room without walking through the pool of blood around McNair and moving his body.

How'd she get out?

Window. He looks for a latch and realises as he clumsily tries to open it that he's not wearing gloves.

His fingerprints are everywhere.

Run or try to wipe down? His prints are on the wall. The bookshelves. The windows. Possibly the curtains. Even if he gets them all, he has a feeling his DNA has probably been planted. Maybe on the rug. Did she take his blood at any point? He's too dazed to tell. He has no idea how carefully she's set him up.

That conniving bitch. He's going to kill her.

He shoves the window open and tumbles out.

No money. No car. He tries to jump one but he's nearly useless without his right hand. McNair apparently had a cottage in a village in the middle of fucking nowhere.

He makes it twelve hours before the hounds catch him.

Albus Dumbledore's eyes are twinkling brightly as he sits across from Tom in an interrogation room.

Tom is slumped back in cold, enraged silence.

"I must say, Tom, things are not looking well for you at the moment."

Tom ignores Dumbledore and imagines himself strangling the librarian until her skin begins turning blue. He superimposes Myrtle's stupid, terror-stricken face with her intelligent gaze and tried to envision how she'd die in his arms.

The cottage had no DNA or fingerprints of anyone by McNair and Tom. Based on the evidence, Tom electrocuted himself while cutting McNair's power, but still went through with the murder while suffering from shock. All the details corroborate it perfectly. There were traces of his charred flesh in the powerbox.

"You are looking a life-sentence—unless you have some kind of information that the agency might find useful. Your sentencing could be dramatically reduced if you were to become a cooperating witness in a larger case."

Tom studies Dumbledore carefully.

If Tom has "killed" McNair, it's logical to assume he also was responsible for killing Mulciber and Dolohov.

Grindelwald undoubtedly will assume it.

Tom's dead if he doesn't leverage some type of protection.

Grindelwald is an obsession of Dumbledore's, which is the very reason Tom joined that particular syndicate in the first place. He'd anticipated that if he were ever caught, turning on Grindelwald could be the ace up his sleeve. Tom's heard stories about what lengths Dumbledore is willing to go to in his attempts to take Grindelwald down.

The librarian knew that Tom was tool in Grindelwald's arsenal. If Tom hadn't killed her beloved friends, someone else would have done it. In the grand scheme of her revenge, Tom is merely the hand with the gun.

Grindelwald is the head.

Tom's choices are rotting in prison until Grindelwald gets someone to kill him, which will likely be soon. Or doing everything in his power to undermine Grindelwald in order to protect himself and, in the process, reduce his sentence.

She gets revenge either way. But the latter option gives Tom the opportunity to eventually get out, track her down, and kill her slowly.

She expects him to choose the latter option. It's what she wants. She's using Tom. His sense of ambition and self-preservation is nothing more than a means to an end for her.

Tom stifles his seething rage and straightens slowly in his seat. He inhales as he meets Dumbledore's eyes.

For now, stay out of jail and stay alive.

He'll make sure to catch up with her later.

"As a matter of fact, I believe I do have information the agency will find useful."


End file.
